Anyway, I've been doing some more form tests, and kind of developed another style of shading my pixels. They look more pastel-y than before. I'm not sure if I like them too much now, but I'm sort of trying to refine it a bit and make them look more 3d.

Hey its umbreon again.

Just shading tests and such.

Also, I tried out a bit of dittering. I do like this one.

I also need to do humans. But I get lazy and go back to animals.Humans will come soon.I promise.

Additional colors like large patches and stripes are secondary and are added only after the flat-color forms are lit. That being said, I recommend you back off of these fancy multicolored furry animals for a while.

You really should work with more simplified forms like a horse or person or something else *not furry* to learn how to light forms. Don't mess with fur/texture until you can get a full-on understanding of how to light things like rocks or faces / muscles first. Once you get past that, then go to something like gravel/sediment/stones, then to bushes and grass, and finally hair and long grass. Then you will be able to work with fur a lot better, but then only dull fur until you get better at things like metal, plastic, etc. since shiny fur is not too incredibly different from other such shiny materials -- it's really just a shiny material with a texture. You won't get good at textured shines like that until you get good at simply-lit forms and materials first. A good example is that Snow Fenrir's creature looks like it has bear fur, which is a great deal more thick, dull, and coarse than shiny wolf fur in each strand. Until you get a sense for how to represent forms, and then all these sorts of textures and materials accurately, I wouldn't suggest adding any stripes/colors/etc. because you will only confuse yourself and run into walls otherwise.

A key thing to remember though is this:

Form and texture happen simultaneously, but are lit differently depending on the material and the texture.

Start with forms, then work your way toward materials and texture simultaneously once you've mastered basic form lighting. With your *first* white wolf above your shading tests, you weren't too far off, but with your others you still have a ways to go. Look at Snow Fenrir's edit of your forms to see the difference in lighting to indicate 3d depth your second white wolf needs and try applying those principles to a horse or something else without fur.

Also, keep in mind, shadows are kind of like pools of water -- they tend to reach out to grab one another like water tends to collect in drops, and, wherever possible, they tend to slide their center-of-mass toward the deepest crevices. This might help you a bit with thinking about form.

Sorry about the multicolored furry animals, I opened requests to practice on another site so most are not my characters. (I did close them today, as I want to work on more personal projects that don't involve pixels too, and my afternoons have been very busy lately.)

Anyway, thank you for the pointers. Specifically, what object/creature/subject do you think I should do? Should I just draw a circle and start shading it like clay, rock, metal, etc to practice that, or should I pick a creature?